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Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Planning Update

After spending yesterday running to stores like Walgreens, The Dollar Store, and Target, I am happy to report that-- for my homeschooled kids at least-- we are all stocked up and ready to jump into our year! Everything looks so pretty all arranged on the shelf-- no marks on anything yet, no bent corners and torn pages, nothing out of place. I just go by and gaze at it lovingly every so often.

Because I know it won't stay that way.

Just like my pretty little picture perfect plans won't stay the way I make them, either. (To see my post about my plans for the year, go here.)

Already I am making new plans from the ones I previously listed. Wondering if perhaps I will take the plunge into lapbooking like I have been wanting to or if we should not take on one more thing. Wondering how in the world I am going to actually do all the things I want to do. Wondering if I actually need to read all the intros and "how to use this book" type of notes that are at the beginning of their books-- or if we could just wing it and be okay.

So far, I know for sure we are going to attempt some sort of lapbook/notebook for the first week or two weeks that the older kids are back in school and we aren't starting on our official school yet. I thought it would be fun to do something easy and not so strict to ease back into the routine of schoolwork dominating our day. I have chosen dolphins as our subject matter, which I think I have mentioned before. The kids are excited to learn about dolphins.

I have thought about doing one subject per month and make a lapbook. Dolphins would be quick and easy in late August. Then for September I thought we would do a unit on the book "T is For Tarheel." I found this really neat teacher's guide that goes with it, thanks to this video. (I have been watching the many instructinal videos on lapbooking offered on YouTube.) October we have a field trip planned with our church group to go to Windy Hill Apple Orchard, home of Johnny Appleseed! (Not really, but he pretends.) So I am sure we will be doing something about apples for that. Then in November, I saw a very neat Thanksgiving lapbook on YouTube that we might attempt. So, that gets us to our Christmas break and I will decide more after that.

As for our picture study, I think we will start off with Norman Rockwell, just because he is an American classic. I plan to learn a bit more about him, and just display his art-- a new picture each week for a month. We will choose an artist a month-- but I haven't decided the order. I know that we will probably include John James Audubon and other natural artists. So they might come next. I am being pretty noncommittal as I like to leave room for natural curiosity to dictate our direction.

I am also still hoping to choose a person a week in the First Book of Biographies and to follow Cay Gibson's Author Fiesta plan for picture books to include as read alouds.

Oh, and our church's homeschool group decided last night at our meeting to do an around the world co-op with each person taking a country a month and hosting everyone at their home to learn about that country. I did this years ago with another co-op and told them about what a great experience it was. They loved the idea and guess who they voted to do the very first country?? While the very thought of doing that right now overwhelms me, I will say that it will tie in nicely with our study of world geography through Ann Voskamp's A Child's Geography.

Speaking of our study of world geography, I was able to find a nice globe at Target yesterday and "World Landmark" flashcards in their dollar spot section. I think these flashcards will be fun to match the landmark to the place they are located on the globe! They also have a world landmark puzzle my kids have already put together and taken apart many times. It was also just $1.

So back to my plans, if you are keeping score, that's an author study, an artist study, a biography study, a country study, and a lapbook/notebook per month on a subject of our choice. That is in addition to our math, language arts, geography and various outside classes.

3 comments:

I'm exhausted! I popped over to see what's going on in the Whalen house and I simply can't keep up! It didn't take me long to figure out that this wasn't a months worth of posts... these were just from this week! It's a good thing you discovered the frozen chopped onions (one of my favorite finds too) because you need every minute you can get. I have to go take a nap now. You wore me out.